Nine days after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, Dr. David Reed, New Canaan's Health Director arrived in Carrefour, a city of 300,000 people 10 miles from Port-au-Prince, where three out of five buildings had collapsed, including most of the medical infrastructure. 

Reed and a small medical rescue team from Stamford Hospital set up a makeshift replacement with sheets, cinder blocks and the wall of an upended plywood shack. Over the next six days, the free clinic treated 732 people, many of whom had never in their lives seen a doctor.

Reed's humanitarian missions began when he was a student at Choate spending summers administering immunizations to the rural poor in Honduras. He has participated in 20 emergency medical assistance missions around the world ever since.

Still, he says he was hardly prepared for what he saw in Haiti.

"Haiti had nothing and now it has less," he said during an interview on Sunday in his New Canaan home office. He returned home on Jan. 29.

After flying into the Dominican Republic, which shares the Carribean island with Haiti, Reed and the team took an eight-hour bus trip through the deforested mountains to the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince. The scene along the way was desperation and chaos, he said. 

The team then traveled to Carrefour with 46 carry-on bags filled with medical supplies donated by Stamford Hospital, St. John's Episcopal Church of Stamford and St. Andrew's Episcopal Church of Bloomfield. 

Once in Carrefour, Reed and Stamford Hospital nurse Ann Giuli were joined by four Haitian nurses and immediately set up shop.

"Word got out quickly and within the hour we were flooded with many patients," he wrote in a journal. 

Conditions were primitive; medical treatments were administered even as unnerving aftershocks continued. 

Reed performed a partial finger amputation under local anesthesia to save a woman's hand. Lacking the correct scalpel and without a medical tool to cut bone, he had to improvise with a multi-purpose camping tool.

"I told the patient she was done and she smiled weakly at me and squeezed my hand,"he wrote in a journal. "She never once made a sound during the entire procedure."

A 12-year-old girl hobbled into the clinic barefoot. She had been buried for two days in rubble and a serious foot wound had festered for days afterward. Reed did what he could to clean the wound, but without intensive follow-up care, he expected she would lose her foot and most of her leg below the knee.

While he spoke elatedly of treating a severely dehydrated 15-day-old baby girl and arranging her evacuation to a U.S. naval floating hospital for intensive treatment that would save her life, Reed had few advanced tools on hand in Haiti. Along with a basic monitor to check blood pressure, oxygen levels and do EKGs, Reed's iPhone also proved invaluable. 

"It was my right arm," he wrote in his journal, grateful that AT&T had provided free service to rescue workers. "I was astonished to be in full contact with the world in the middle of a devastated earthquake area."

With the iPhone, he e-mailed and texted to other rescue workers and NGOs in Haiti as well as colleagues and family back in the U.S. He even used it to calculate the dose of medicine needed to treat a child suffering from an ear ache after guessing at the child's weight. 

"I did not have a scale, so I joked with the staff about the 'Reed-o-meter,'" he wrote. 

Frustrated at the lack of an x-ray machine to assist in setting fractures, he also sent an urgent e-mail with his iPhone to Stamford Hospital asking for old x-ray equipment no longer in use.

That communication flashed into the headquarters of Fuji Medical Systems, which donated a $200,000 state-of-the-art digital x-ray machine. A ceremony honoring Fuji took place at Stamford Hospital on Friday, Reed said.

Before returning home, Reed turned over the "keys" to the clinic to a volunteer pediatrician and made plans to assure the clinic's continuity and longevity after his departure.

Back in Connecticut, the surgeon with a master's degree in public health and an MBA is fund-raising to help St. John's Episcopal Church of Stamford and its large Haitian congregation build a permanent school in Carrefour and clinic to house the city's fancy new x-ray machine. 

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Contributions on behalf of École le Bon Samaritain  in Carrefour can be sent to:

Old St. Andrew's Episcopal Church

59 Tariffville Rd

Bloomfield, CT 06002

Write "Haiti" on the memo line of checks made out to the church.